Skysphere: More than two celestials

[Cervator]

In keeping with #94 and #95, allow more than two celestial objects in the sky, which likely requires a bit of architecture to allow arbitrary celestials

Could also include a shiny new moon of a different color / design!

Difficulty: If this ends up impacting lighting it might get hairy. Could cheat and just set "If any sun in the sky light = x; if only moon in sky light = y)

Would be neat tho to dynamically vary lighting based on celestials - but that might be a tad out of scope

[Cervator]

Tossing this item into the L&S extras milestone as one moon per faction would be sweet. Tentatively tagging it to @begla hoping he'd be up for it sometime :D

[emanuele3d]

Hi! Very first post in the project, please forgive my newbieness. What is the most appropriate location to sketch the ideas to respond to this issue? Here? Somewhere in the forum?

Also, I think #94 and #95 are really specific cases of this issue and can be treated with a more general solution for all things celestial. They could perhaps be merged with this issue then? On the other hand, at this stage issue #97 does seem a very different beast. Unless we generalize all four issues to "how to handle things that are in the skysphere and do not interact with the world other than (perhaps) by lighting it".

Speaking of lighting, which is marked above as a difficulty: has the situation changed? One of the latest videos show directional lighting and shadows. Can the new lighting system/shaders handle multiple infinite-distance light sources? Can it handle sources of different color and intensity? Is there a maximum number? In this context the Skysphere system (!) could perhaps offer a ranked list of light sources and the user might have a setting to limit the number of enabled ones to, say, the first 3 in the list. But I'm already delving in the details and perhaps this is not the right place to do it.

Awaiting instructions!

Manu from Switzerland

[Cervator]

Hi @emanuele3d and welcome! The forum would probably be the best place for in-depth discussion, and would also be a good way to get an update on this area - this is admittedly an older issue even if it is still valid :-)

Post a Skysphere thread in the Dev Portal if you'd like to get some pointers, especially on the actual lighting functionality. There is some reworking being done for sunlight right now to support vertically stacked chunks, might be a good time to review in general.

https://forum.terasology.org/forums/developer-portal.5/

I could probably badger @begla via email to get some specific feedback after we have the basic thread up and running :-)

From the recent past I know the moon and sun have become shader-based, where at least the moon used to be a texture painted on top of the skysphere. It would be nice to arrive at an "arbitrary skysphere object system" to be able to support all the issues you refer to, and maybe at this point we can actually do that with support for modules (which wasn't really a thing when this issue was created)

Also feel free to post an intro thread to tell us a bit about yourself :-)

Looking very much forward to some movement in this area!

[emanuele3d]

Thanks @Cervator! Will do!